ART/ARCHITECTURE

ART/ARCHITECTURE; Theresa Cha: In Death, Lost And Found

By AMEI WALLACH

Published: April 20, 2003

THERE are artists whose deaths define the way you tell their stories: the poets Sylvia Plath and Frank O'Hara, the photographer Diane Arbus, the painters Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. The artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha died such a death in 1982.

She was 31 years old and newly married. She had just received advance copies of her book ''Dictée.'' She was preparing a piece for a group show at Artists Space in SoHo and working part time in the design department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her husband, Richard Barnes, was photographing the restoration of the Puck Building in SoHo. On the evening of Nov. 5, Cha went to meet him there. Just inside the door, she was confronted by Joey Sanza, a security guard for the building, who raped and strangled her. It took three trials and five years to convict him.

The Artists Space exhibit became a memorial for the Korean-born Cha; ''Dictée'' was published posthumously and eventually taught in literature courses. Its subject is loss: of country, language, memory, time. Its technique is a montage of family photographs, maps, diagrams, stories and prose poems. In intermittent French, English and Latin and the letters of the Korean alphabet, Cha conflates her mother's past with the stories of martyrs: Demeter and her daughter, Persephone, bride of the underworld, from Greek legend; the revolutionary heroine Yu Guan Soon from Korean history; and from Cha's Catholic upbringing, Joan of Arc. You do not always know who she is writing about; the spare words are luminous, but often fragmented.

''Dictée'' was most recently reprinted in 2001 by the University of California Press and has influenced a variety of artists and poets. But the book is all that most of them have seen of her wide-ranging art, and she has remained unknown to a larger public. Her 1993 exhibition at the Whitney Museum, organized by Lawrence Rinder (who has since become a curator there), ''was not reviewed in a single English-language newspaper or magazine,'' Mr. Rinder said.

Now a new traveling retrospective, ''A Dream of the Audience,'' seeks to redress the lapse. The exhibition, on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts through June 15, was organized by Constance Lewallen, the senior curator of the Berkeley Art Museum in California, and will end its seven-city tour in Seoul, Korea, where Cha is virtually unknown.

Cha made quiet work with a disquieting impact. Those who saw her performances remember that she spoke softly, with the hypnotic rhythms of incantation. She had studied Korean dance and tai chi, and her movements were fluid and slow. Often she would perform in front of a screen on which slides were projected, weaving through the patterned light.

''In this piece, I want to be the dream of the audience,'' she wrote in her extensive notes for her 1975 performance titled ''A Ble Wail.'' At the Bronx Museum, 28 photographs and typewritten texts document the performance.

The audience watched through a cheesecloth curtain that accentuated the dreamlike sequences as Cha, robed in white, unfurled banners of black and red cloth in a candlelit space. The accompanying sound, her notes say, came from ''singing glasses,'' sheets being torn and percussive instruments.

To see at a distance, literally through cotton batting, and to hear sounds that make no sense, are metaphors for Cha's obsession with the blurring of memory and the muffling of native speech. As hard as it is to lose the day-to-day use of a childhood language through moving to a new country, it is worse to be forbidden to speak it publicly in your own country, as Cha's parents were under the Japanese occupation that ended after World War II. They had to learn yet another language after the family emigrated to the United States from the South Korean port city of Pusan in 1963, when Cha was 12.

By 1964, the family had moved to San Francisco. Cha entered the University of California at Berkeley in 1969, just in time for the student protest movement, with its sit-ins and riot police. It was a heady and alarming moment. For Cha, who was born during the Korean War, the uproar echoed the tumult of Korean history. The trauma of the experience is in the fragmentary stories she tells in ''Dictée,'' and the excitement of experimentation is in the inventive ways she tells them. It was also a moment when French film theory and abstract literature were in ascendance on the Berkeley campus, and the feminist movement was beginning.

Cha used it all. But her art transcends both pedantry and sentimentality. It can be incredibly moving. In her 1975 video ''Mouth to Mouth,'' the physical making of sounds becomes painfully evocative. The film begins with a pan across the symbols for eight Korean vowels. Then in close-up a mouth silently shapes itself to say each vowel, over a soundtrack of bubbling water and bird song. But you see the mouth through a haze of white static; what might have been clear at the point of transmission arrives as a snowy apparition.

In her 1977 artist's book ''Father/Mother,'' color photocopies -- and you can imagine how bad these were in 1977 -- picturing her family and annotated with layered text are covered in plain brown paper and bound with thread, a most insubstantial medium with which to affix the past.

Her 1980 sculpture ''Untitled'' consists of a glass jar containing five pieces of paper strung like a garland with thread. The typewritten words are French for the five elements of the universe: water, fire, earth, ether and air. ''Surplus Novel'' is two white bowls given to her by her sister, Bernadette, and her brother James; Cha filled them with strips of typewritten words that mimic a Beatles song and tell how someone called out to her, ''Yoko,'' during a walk she took. Yoko Ono is, of course, Japanese, not Korean, though she, too, straddled Eastern thought and Western experience. Mistaken identity is another instance in which words can be meant and heard in different ways.

''Theresa Cha had a solid and remarkable 10 years of work behind her when she was killed,'' Mr. Rinder said. ''In the same breath she was drawing on Korean shamanistic ideas and theories about cinematic structure. She was able to take essential themes and see their expression across cultures. She was engaged with theory on a very cosmopolitan level, which isn't to say one can't be simply swept away emotionally by her work, because that's what makes it great art.''

Mr. Rinder was a graduate student at Hunter College and on the prowl for a master's thesis subject when he first encountered Cha's work in the late 1980's. The art historian Moira Roth was giving a slide lecture on 100 unknown Asian women artists. Transfixed by the four Cha slides, Mr. Rinder asked Ms. Roth for more after the lecture. She told him that all the work still belonged to Cha's family. He gained access, wrote his thesis and, when he became a curator at the Berkeley Art Museum, mounted a small Cha exhibition there in 1990. Cha had spent eight years at the university, earned four degrees and immersed herself in avant-garde film as an usher at the Pacific Film Archive. Her older brother, John, the director of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation, approached Mr. Rinder to offer the Berkeley Museum and the Pacific Film Archive a joint gift of the artist's art and archives.

Most of Cha's work is in black and white. The family kept her most colorful, most political piece, the 1976 ''Amer,'' a pre-1959 American flag with 48 stars. On one of the stripes, Cha stamped the word Amer. In French, amer means bitter; à mer means to the sea. America spread from sea to shining sea and then expanded on to Hawaii and Alaska. In her own way, Cha was taming the symbolism of a flag that had become a political powder keg by the end of the Vietnam War. Her play on words is poetic and enigmatic. The fact that the words are French distances them but is also a reminder of the tangled relationships between France and Vietnam, and France and America.

After Sept. 11, 2001, the day Cha's show opened in Berkeley, the flag again became a universal symbol of endurance and unity. But Cha's family has removed ''Amer'' from the exhibition at the Bronx Museum. Once more all sides of the debate on the war in Iraq are wrapping themselves in the American flag. Its presence would only upstage and distort a show as gentle as this one.

Would Theresa Cha have removed it? Generally she avoided politics and reached for the universal, but we can only wonder what she would would have done had she lived. Our loss.

Photos: Stills, left, from ''Aveugle Voix'' (''Blind Voice''), 1975, one of Theresa Cha's performance films that is on view in ''The Dream of the Audience'' at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Cha's ''Untitled,'' 1980, below, is also in the show, which includes sculpture, photographs and texts. (Photographs from the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation)

Amei Wallach is the president of the United States section of the International Art Critics Association.